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Windows 7: Upgrading Windows 7 Home Premium to Professional

Very little image compression except in the paid programs. It only uses that actual used space however, not the empty spaces.

What brought up my hesitation about Anytime releasing your Home Premium key for reuse is that I am not even sure which DVD would be used for a Repair Install on the Anytime Upgraded Pro.

I posed this here some months ago and received only conjecture that it might not be possible to Repair Install the unlocked Pro version since neither HP or Pro DVD's would likely work.

Based on the principle that an in-place Upgrade invalidates the underlying OS's activation (under the EULA only, there is no mechanism), I would have to guess that since Anytime is an Upgrade it would invalidate the underlying Win7 for further use under EULA.

Hence you probably will want to do either the Clean Install or the in-Place Upgrade workaround which completely wipes away the HP activation and resets it requiring the insertion of a Pro key.

Thanks for the follow-up. So can an in-place upgrade be done while keeping files and whatnot intact? It looks like that was possible when going from Vista to Windows 7, so I would hope that it is still possible when going from one Windows 7 to another.

Yes that is the only reason to do the in-place Upgrade workaround: it keeps your files, programs and settings in place. Activation is reset, Product Key must be installed fresh at Control Panel>System.

Technically it is a Repair Install, so you can read about it's exact process here: Repair Install

Yes that is the only reason to do the in-place Upgrade workaround: it keeps your files, programs and settings in place. Activation is reset, Product Key must be installed fresh at Control Panel>System.

Technically it is a Repair Install, so you can read about it's exact process here: Repair Install

Thanks for the help, I think this is definitely the best option for me. I appreciate the help!

This is a workaround that was given at the time millions of beta testers were needing to change from the RC beta to a retail version of Win7. It worked amazingly well in spite of MS warnings, and got rave reviews from everyone who tried it here. It worked fine in recent months, too.

It is possible now that the RC is expired, MS has sent out an update to disable it, however. Reading the comments in the original tutorial there was a fail on July 1st, and testing here in VM also failed today.

It is still worth a try as you'll only have to clean install if it fails and you need to do that anyway to be sure Anytime Upgrade doesn't block your underlying Premium key.

This is a workaround that was given at the time millions of beta testers were needing to change from the RC beta to a retail version of Win7. It worked amazingly well in spite of MS warnings, and got rave reviews from everyone who tried it here. It worked fine in recent months, too.

It is possible now that the RC is expired, MS has sent out an update to disable it, however. Reading the comments in the original tutorial there was a fail on July 1st, and testing here in VM also failed today.

It is still worth a try as you'll only have to clean install if it fails and you need to do that anyway to be sure Anytime Upgrade doesn't block your underlying Premium key.

I wanted to try and do this without having to worry about going in and backing up everything on my desktop, so I am little nervous about "trying" something out. I might just have to suck it up and go through and back everything up.

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